


quiet mountain life

by ConvenientAlias



Category: Moths - Ouida, Undisclosed Fandom
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-11
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:41:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28013355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConvenientAlias/pseuds/ConvenientAlias
Summary: Vere and Correze are satisfied to settle down in the mountains together. Mostly society has forgotten about them, except perhaps one or two people...
Comments: 3
Kudos: 3
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	quiet mountain life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lunabee34 (Lorraine)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorraine/gifts).



In the circles of society—in Paris in particular, but in other cities as well, Moscow for example and Berlin—there was a great deal of whispering lately about Vere Correze, no longer Vera the Princess Zouroff and no longer even Vere Herbert (that state of affairs had apparently lasted only a couple weeks) but Vere Correze. Well, why shouldn’t there have been? The woman had been discovered in an affair with a famous singer, unceremoniously divorced by her husband (and immediately replaced by Jeanne de Sonnaz), and had shown not a whit of shame about the matter.

That is to say, it was said she was shameless because she stayed with her lover and soon after married him, and because to all the divorce proceedings she had not made the slightest protest and in fact she refused to defend herself to anyone who chanced upon her. But indeed she was generally silent on the whole issue, so it was hard to say how she felt. She was called “shameless” because it was the easiest, the most exciting and yet least worrying, label one could put upon her, and so society found it the most appealing.

Vere herself, the person Vere, had been largely forgotten by the citizens of Paris. They remembered instead Vere the phenomenon, Vere the event, and Vere the innocent girl with the marble-like gravity was cast aside or caricatured, and certainly not remembered with any degree of accuracy. Correze was remembered a bit more accurately because he had been more intimate with the citizens of Paris and because his talent and wonder had so often been in the limelight, but even then, scandal and tragedy cast a tint over his reputation so that even his past friends and lovers remembered him not quite right. And none of them perhaps understood him as he had been in his final days before quitting the city, anguished and righteous and then, at last, at peace with his “mistress” (for the two at last had given up disputing the phrase, and it was true enough that she ruled him, though their intentions were pure) watching over him in his sickness. No, no one had really known him then; at least, no one who was anyone in Paris.

And Vere and Rafael Correze were quite content to be forgotten by society; in fact, they would happily have forgotten society themselves, but there were one or two people who perforce they remembered.

* * *

The first was Jeanne de Sonnaz, now Jeanne de Zouroff.

When her letter came, Vere at first did not intend to read it. “I would never have received that woman in my home,” she said to Correze. “Why should I read and acknowledge her words? It’s amazing to me that she dares to write at all.”

Correze had often been amazed at what the world would dare to present in Vere’s face, Vere being the woman she was, but he also was well aware that some women really were without shame, even though Vere was not actually one of them. “Burn it,” he suggested. “There is nothing of value she can say to you, is there? Nothing you need or want to read or hear. She and her ilk are nothing to us anymore.”

Vere pursed her lips. “That might be the higher ground to take,” she admitted, “but it seems cowardly, doesn’t it? Besides, there might be something, you know.”

“Something to sting you, most likely. Jeanne de Sonnaz is a snake.”

“Very much so. But once I thought her the only one who was kind to me, apart perhaps from Nadine.” That had made the betrayal sting more in the end, and yet… as if mesmerized, Vere found she could not help but open the letter. Perhaps she wished for some explanation, even knowing none could be sufficient. If that was what she hoped for, then Jeanne de Sonnaz had put in her best effort to provide one—though not perhaps one that Vere could accept.

_“Dearest Vere,_

_“I’m sure you’re outraged that I would dare to address you so, and well you should be. Still, you were dear to me—it’s no lie at all that I enjoyed your presence. You were to me as to all society a great novelty. And I saw you as a Michelangelo painting, you know, quite a piece of art, too perfect for the world—perhaps too perfect for me to coexist with you, in the end._

_“And if too perfect for me, far too perfect for my (also dear) Prince Zouroff! We can agree he ought never to have married you, I think. Pearls before swine. You understand now, too, perhaps, that the prince was always my swine, not really yours. For you he occasionally felt the urge to be a stallion, but it is really not in his nature nor his desiring to be such a noble beast. A man of flesh and blood should never marry a Michelangelo._

_“Him divorcing you is quite the best thing that could have happened to you. You have become a scandal, yes, but scandal never bothered you much; only the question of honor. You’ve always liked being a martyr anyhow—martyrs often have had terrible reputations. Now you can be with your dear singer, far away from all us dirty rabble. Tell me, aren’t you happier? Zouroff could never make you happy, but he will make me happy, and Correze could never have been a match for me but he is a good match for you. So you see everyone is in their proper place._

_“Honestly, I am happy for you. Let me reiterate: I always was very fond of you. I cared more for you than your husband for you, or you for your husband, or even me for your husband. Did I not defend you in all arguments, or even from idle gossipers? Did I not entrust my own children to you? Did I not give you good company and make your days easier, counsel you on important matters? I have never been a better friend to anyone than to you, nor have you had a better friend. Now in Paris they say I am unreasonably lenient when I speak of my husband’s scandalous ex-wife, but I will continue to be unreasonably lenient. Of course you understand I will never be able to speak with you in public or welcome you into my husband’s home, but in my heart you will always have a special place. I hope you will remember me too, and perhaps in time you will remember that I was kind to the little innocent you were._

_“Yours truly,_

_“Jeanne de Sonnaz.”_

There was nothing incriminating in the letter, only the lightest implication of any affair. It was typical of Jeanne de Sonnaz’s delicacy in that, but it was also practical and easy to understand. There was in truth very little sting to it despite Correze’s fears. Did it mock Vere’s “innocence”? Did it quietly smirk at the fact that now Jeanne could shun her as she had once shunned Jeanne—shunned her so determinedly it had cost her her health and almost her life? Did it gloat on Jeanne’s dominion over the man who had once been Vere’s husband? Of course it did. But none of these things could hurt Vere. She already knew all these things, and her pride had taken a hit with the divorce, it was true, but pride had ceased to matter to her; she had known from the instant she heard of Correze’s injury that there were things that mattered far more.

Correze asked, “Does she say anything interesting? Or hurtful?” He did not ask her exactly what the letter contained, or ask to read it himself. Vere deserved her privacy, especially with such delicate matters as this.

“She calls herself my best friend in the world,” Vere said. She smiled drily. “And in all truth, she is not entirely wrong. She was better to me than my husband, than my sister-in-law, far better than my own mother! But all the same… if I were a man, I could have confronted her as you confronted Zouroff.”

Correze shrugged a little embarrassedly. He took no pride in that duel to which he had been driven by passion, though Vere esteemed him for it.

“I have better friends, though,” Vere continued, “though for some time I felt I had none. I have you, after all, and many common people. And in society, I have one friend I do not entirely deserve—which reminds me, my dear…”

* * *

Fuchsia, Duchess of Mull, was surprised and delighted to receive an invitation to visit the Correze household for a few weeks in the summer. She told everyone in the city about her plans to accept, and when a couple of them made vague tsking or hrming sounds, questioning the propriety of the couple she intended to visit, she told them with great indignation that her cousin-in-law was innocent of all the things she was accused of and was in fact a great woman and anyone should be so lucky as to be invited to come see her. And the latter was certainly true. No one else had been invited to visit the Correzes from their former life—not even Vere’s mother, though this was not surprising considering that the two had never really gotten along. Fuchsia considered it a special honor since she and Vere had never really gotten along either.

“And you know I can’t fully appreciate the beauty of the mountains,” she told Vere wistfully during her visit. “Not that they aren’t very nice, but I’m much more of a city person. There are plenty of mountains back in America, and they never impressed me all that much. But it suits you—much better than the city does, and much better than Russia, not that you didn’t make Szarisla seem like a palace—a classy palace, to be sure, but one belonging to a princess.”

“I’ve had enough of being a princess,” Vere said, as frankly as Fuchsia might have herself. (Good Lord, she wore her divorce lightly! Fuchsia could only shake her head in approval.) “Being a Correze is much better, and these mountains…” She took in a deep breath.

It was a pity she couldn’t finish the sentence, Fuchsia thought, for whatever she was trying to express was somewhat beyond Fuchsia.

It was a pleasant visit. Not very diverting—and no, Correze didn’t sing, couldn’t sing, she told all the curious crowd in Paris when she came back—but peaceful, revitalizing. And Vere did have some interesting things to talk about. Now that she was no longer busy with society affairs or preoccupied with secret (or not-so-secret) pains of the heart, she had become absorbed in books of mathematics and philosophy, which she would discuss at great length. Fuchsia couldn’t always follow, but she tried her best, and found she ended up agreeing with Vere’s philosophical conclusions more often than not.

“You are wise as well as clever,” Vere said solemnly one evening. “I wasted a great deal of time judging you unfairly. How much I regret that now.”

“Oh, don’t regret it,” Fuchsia said cheerfully. “It didn’t cause me any harm, after all, and least said, soonest mended.”

She suggested towards the end of her visit (which lasted a couple weeks) that Vere might come back to the Mull estate now if she wished. “We don’t give a hang about all those people who talk about you, you know. We know who’s in the right. And it might not be Bulmer, but it’s England; why not return to England for a while?”

Vere said she would consider it, if her husband might come with her. (How strange, to have a husband you wanted with you, with you all the time! A husband who was a comfort and a joy! It was how Vere had imagined marriage might be, and yet she had despaired her life would ever be like this.) Fuchsia of course said Correze was always welcome. “We’re fond of anyone who makes Vere happy, after all—though we still think you might have shot Prince Zouroff in the throat, too, or even in the head. He did deserve it.”

* * *

So society sometimes snuck in at the cracks, and sometimes even was welcomed. But for the most part, the little house in the Alps was very quiet. Unsociable, maybe—but there was a great deal of love despite this quiet. And sometimes in the quiet, Vere sang. She had little in the way of training, but it brought Correze joy to listen her, and occasionally he offered coaching. In turn, Vere would talk to him about mathematics, and they would solve long and complex equations together some nights. Or spend them other ways—ways Vere had never expected to enjoy after her marriage, but that she found now to be far better than she imagined. Correze was a far cry from Zouroff.

They led a peaceful life, and as society forgot them little by little, they began to imprint a memory on the mountains. Stone had no human memory, nor did grass or mountain air, but it would remember them in its way, in the way two such as they deserved to be remembered.


End file.
